Colm O’Cinneide

Previous posts in this blog symposium have outlined the design, purpose and functioning of the Irish Citizens’ Assembly, and offered different perspectives on its impact on the 2018 Irish abortion referendum. But there is another dimension to the debate about the Assembly which is worth discussing - namely the international attention it has attracted.

David Kenny

The task facing the Citizens’ Assembly was very challenging. It had to deal with many issues of medical, ethical and legal importance; to hear personal stories alongside complex regulatory information; and to offer space for ordinary citizens to process and deliberate on all of this.

Máiréad Enright

The 2016-2017 Irish Citizens’ Assembly served some feminist goals. However, it was structured around four flawed assumptions: 

First, abortion law was properly a subject for communal decision-making, even though some of the most intimate aspects of women’s lives were at stake.

Laura Cahillane

While the Citizens’ Assembly has been widely lauded as a success, it is important to remember that the success pertains to the issue of the Eighth Amendment only. This exercise proved useful in that once the Assembly had made its recommendations, it then allowed the Government to proceed with a referendum on the basis that there was a solid basis for putting the question to the people …

Eoin Carolan

Ireland seems to be becoming the poster-child for progressive constitutional politics. The liberal-leaning results of successive referenda on marriage equality, abortion, and blasphemy ran counter to widely-held international conceptions of Irish society as “until recently …. deeply conservative”.

Fiona de Londras

Given how contentious abortion tends to be as a matter of both political and legal discourse, it may be tempting to seek out a ‘silver bullet’ from the Irish experience; to find what, if anything, made our experience of abortion law reform so distinctive and, from the perspective of those in favor of liberalization, so successful.

Jane Suiter

The creation of both the Citizens’ Assembly and the previous Convention on the Constitution played a role in supporting various referendums for constitutional change, most notably marriage equality and abortion regulation, suggesting a degree of ‘systemization’ of deliberation in the Irish process of constitutional review.

Oran Doyle

Abortion was criminalised in Ireland by sections 58 and 59 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861. During the 1970s and early 1980s, a number of judicial dicta suggested that the Constitution implicitly protected the right to life of the unborn. In 1983, the people approved the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, inserting Article 40.3.3.

Erika Arban & Tom Gerald Daly

An Eye-Catching Experiment

On 25 May 2018 the Irish public voted in a referendum to repeal the eighth amendment of the Constitution of Ireland, which had accorded equal constitutional protection to the life of the mother and the unborn. Since the result, international attention has focused on the novel deliberative mechanism that led to the referendum being tabled: the Citizens’ Assembly, composed of 99 randomly selected citizens and chaired by a former Supreme Court judge.